📥 Your Future of Work Digest #9

🕹 Preparing to work in the Metaverse

We’ve already seen some companies starting to use the metaverse for employee onboarding, but it will still require a long time to make it a daily and standard practice to be in and use the metaverse for work. For the curious though, here are some potential ways you could prepare:

🥽 Headsets - VR and AR headsets are going to be the bread and butter; instead of a Zoom meeting across multiple time zones, the metaverse will offer the possibility for full bicontinental coworking in a common workspace. Joining virtual rooms and cowork with a much more satisfying physical nuance and casual proximity than that offered by a video screen. And as with all new technology, it will get progressively better and cheaper.

What you can do today: Try the technology, use the apps.

Main concern: Isn’t it going to be awful for eyesight?

🎮 Gaming Meetups - Instead of vying for a promotion during a round of golf, the metaverse offers your employees a variation on the “third space.” The desire to keep people involved means metaverses for the office will be built to facilitate casual conversation and social interaction.

Right now, gaming is the entry point for most metaverse engagement. Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs) are arguably the first iteration of the current metaverse, which has a surprisingly long history. When offices enter the metaverse, they break down the social barrier between Slack and Twitch. We will see more office-centered “organized fun” that mimics the tone and breadth of immersive video games.

What you can do today: Learn what the most popular games are?

Main concern: Gaming is not for everybody. Other ways to do team-building will arise, but likely to be still ‘game-like’.

👮 Who’s in charge - Traditional organizational models are already being disrupted, moving from hierarchical to holocratic (more about this on my article here).

Potential decisions subject to employee input via DAOs (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations) could involve building bigger or more varied virtual meeting spaces or how and where corporate branding is displayed during presentations.

• Will meeting minutes be able to be logged as NFTs on the blockchain?

• Are corporate negotiations held in the metaverse allowed to be recorded?

• Should this metaverse allow its developers to make the necessary changes to incorporate the newest plug-in?

What you can do today: Join some DAOs (my write-up on DAOs here) to see how they work.

Main concern: DAOs are still a bit of a mess today. A lot of good tools are being built to help governance, coordination, compensation - but be warned they are now potentially more ‘scary’ than efficient in terms of information overload.

🍃 Leaving Over Climate Change

A third of UK employees say they are willing to quit their jobs if their employer takes no action to reduce or eliminate its carbon footprint.

The sentiment was even stronger among Gen Z with over half of 18 to 24 year olds saying they would be willing to leave a company based on its net-zero credentials.

It also found that even in a recession, 32 per cent of employees said they would not be comfortable with their company cutting its sustainability program to save money.

The problem: Traditional carbon offsets are ineffective at best, fraudulent at worst.

🤖 AI Will replace Middle-Management First

A popular article shared on Hacker News argues that “the AI decision making paradigm shift will and it is going to save corporations billions of dollars in salary costs per year as middle management disappears”

The Problem: Middle management is “human management”- something AI is miles miles away from being able to do. AI will make good middle management even more critical, by removing the non-human aspects of the job.

📱 App of the Week

From this edition, I thought it would be useful to introduce some cool apps I’ve been finding on ProductHunt or other sources, that are connected with the Future of Work.

This week a mention goes to Sesh - an app that promises to ‘Keep your meetings on track with a visual agenda’

It has some cool features like:

• manages your meeting time

• activities like icebreakers, brainstorms, and votes